Soft Condensed Matter

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SOFT CONDENSED MATTER*

A similar thing happens to me most Mondays and Thursdays: I end up having a longer day than I expected and make my way to the gym late enough to listen to a newly released politics podcast during my cool down lap on the indoor track. The voices of the likes of Nate Silver and Mara Liasson may not be the most motivational when it comes to working out but by the time I am back in my apartment, reheating some assortment of leftovers for dinner, they will have told me what has happened and what they think about it, all colored with some podcast co-host banter, to an extent that seems sufficient to land me into the reasonably informed person category. Last summer I would often catch a podcast about cases currently argued at the Supreme Court while walking to the farmer’s market. Almost every morning I listen to an update from NPR and the New York Times through the white noise of my shower and as a background to the daily fight with my overflowing moka pot. I barely ever read newspapers or political and news websites, I don’t receive news related push notifications on my phone and I have only recently very modestly dipped my toes into the Twitter news-stream. In this political climate, however, news and politics seem to be so embedded in all topics of conversation and so urgent at all times that any news media diet becomes insufficient rather quickly. Even the podcast-only regime I have chosen seems to haunt me most weeks because reasons for emergency episodes and episode extras continue to be abundant with remarkable consistency. Something extraordinary keeps happening and hearing about it has become, at all times, crucial.

Listening to pundits constantly debate the many current events at some point makes those events sound like plot developments in a particularly convoluted, and mildly unreal, TV drama. Senators and various White House staff members start to sound like stock characters an average Netflix show writer could have come up with, ‘palace intrigue’ stops registering like a strange phrase to use in relation to a branch of government rather than a soap opera pitch, and ‘Georgia 6th’ might as well be a TV show spinoff rather than an actual place. A few weeks ago, one of the NPR Politics podcast hosts acknowledged this – the current state of the White House now reads like a full-blown telenovela. This amusing comparison is unsettlingly compelling as it seems like there are not many characters that are guaranteed to stay on the ‘screen’, new shadowy figures keep emerging whenever the shock of all previous revelations subsides and if one zones out and temporarily loses track of the plot picking it back up is in equal parts very confusing and full of completely expected developments. Moreover, tensions run high, decisions are made, re-made and un-made from hour to hour, and none of the central conflicts really get resolved as much as they continue to be used to add more and more interwoven threads to the main story focused on a few individuals so much larger than life that they cannot be anything but cartoon-like villains.**

This is exemplified by the fact that it is now common to lose one’s job in the top tiers of government due to a reason as nebulous and fuzzy as ‘lack of chemistry’. The more sinister take on reporters using this phrase is that they are not willing to outright say that it is now normal for high ranking officials to fire their subordinates if they disagree with them. Even if one takes a less cynical point of view, the phrase is still peculiar as a staple of White House reporting. It reminds me of sitcoms in which characters fail to communicate and end relationshipss by claiming they are just not ready to date or, more in the spirit of George Constanza, that there is something wrong with them rather than there being a real conflict. Regardless of which it is – a sugar-coating of a more and more confining and unilateral style of government or a colossal inability to be honest about disagreement – it also seems to belong in a teenage drama or a soap rather than CNN reports and the front page of the Washington Post.

When I think of convoluted soaps, I think of my grandmothers. In my childhood both have fallen prey to haciendas and poor-farm-girl-posh-city-boy storylines of Mexican soaps, and in recent years the mild exoticism of those produced in Turkey. The rest of the family lovingly scoffed at this manner of entertainment and whenever a soap was prioritized over a soccer game for TV time at a family gathering, we would express minor outrage. This is not an uncommon experience; as far as I am concerned soaps are mostly made for grandmas and their granddaughters. When I was in middle school a telenovela actress with Croatian family roots visited the country and both generations of women flocked to meet her. It was basically a riot consisting of 60 and 16-year-old women mixed in equal parts. While my grandmas always insisted (and still do) that the appeal of soaps is in the culture the characters belong to and the places they reside in, I have always suspected that prepubescent and teenage girls watched them for different reasons. Namely, the sappy love stories older women knew to be embarrassed for liking and the occasional glimpse of (highly unrealistic) sex. Regardless, soap operas are unsubtly coded as an entertainment product made for women, down to the association between the soap ads that earned them the moniker and corresponding domestic labor that is typically attributed to women as well.

The soapy petty drama is rarely associated with men, and especially not men in ‘high places’, or men in office. In the spirit of invoking the founding fathers and the era of enlightenment as often as reassurance of righteousness is needed, men who make decisions tend to be portrayed as either rational and steadfast in their principles or, if it cannot be avoided, as extremely pragmatic, opportunistic and driven towards personal success. There is a notion of coldness and calculatedness associate with them. Even when it comes to discussing their families it is either to achieve a goal or as they are leaving their positions and need an easily relatable excuse. Part of the bewilderment surrounding palace intrigue and chemistry mismatch driven stories then inevitably stems from having to confront the fact that the sort of shallow reasoning and deceitful representation of those involved in disagreement typically associated with women and their soaps can in fact be championed by some of the most powerful men in the world as well.

In the past week I have been invited to participate in the process of choosing a new Department Head for the physics department I belong to. Heading to lunch with one of candidates for the job I was unsure of what to expect. The other graduate students that had been invited seemed similarly cautious about our course of action. Luckily, the conversation was less awkward than it could have been and, over the rustling of catered sandwiches, we had a conversation about graduate students’ mental health, mentoring, diversity and the ways in which the next Department Head could interact with us more. The issue of whether graduate students are happy and the lack of ‘soft skills’ administrators and faculty often exhibit took up so much of the allotted time that we barely touched upon some of the more openly tumultuous events that graduate students on our campus engaged in earlier this semester. Leaving the lunch, our conversation ended by the entrance of the next group the candidate was supposed to meet with, I was struck by how much of what the students in the room converged on advocating for could be boiled down to more compassion and more empathy from administrators. However, in a field heavily dominated by men, it should have not shocked me that what we identified as lacking were personality traits that are also traditionally coded as feminine.

The problem with leadership, be it petty and contentious or well-meaning yet disconnected from its community, more often than not seems to be that it is modeled after men and men are taught to value everything but ‘soft skills’, compassion and empathy. In particular, by establishing a strong, almost exclusionary, connection between women and the more nurturing aspects of maintaining community (or governing it), traditional norms of behavior make it easier to dismiss those skills as unimportant since the feminine is already seen as the inferior. Emotional labor, and anything that approaches it, is deemed to be beneath the leaders because it is feminine. Further, because it is seen as, feminine women are probably already taking care of it, without being given credit. Because it is feminine, and leaders are typically not, this sort of labor gets written out of job descriptions. Because it is feminine, these sorts of skills get devalued until the negative side of the same spectrum becomes the most prominent and we end up with soapy palace intrigue and a sweeping lack of chemistry. In an atmosphere where respecting others’ feelings and considering their well-being without being forced to is not rewarded but rather looked down upon, it is much easier for malicious and toxic individuals to maintain power and prominence. As a particularly ironic twist, once they start wreaking havoc the language used to describe it refers back to concerns that sound feminine as well – as if anyone other than grandmas should care about the petty drama. If the communication skills necessary to foster a welcoming and functional work environment were considered invaluable instead of just feminine maybe there would be less petty drama. If we did not liken it to content that can be dismissed as frivolous women’s entertainment maybe we would do more about it and substitute action for just wide-eyed bewilderment.

Ultimately, the problem lies within the feedback loop that designates certain types of behaviors as feminine, then designates anything feminine as inferior so that women engaging in modes of communications they are told are congruous with their gender end up devalued for doing just that. This is a hard problem, seemingly hardwired into most of what makes our society the way it is today. The scale and the complexity of it are overwhelming and change does not always seem to be in sight. However, since 2016 the number of women running for office in the United States has doubled, and even if none of them get elected, such a large increase in presence cannot possibly leave the conversation about leadership and government unchanged. It is likely overly simplistic to claim that more women in office would necessarily mean a greater respect for skills that have previously been dismissed because they were seen as feminine – stories of powerful women in the past sadly often show that they get reviled for being both too feminine and not feminine enough. Nevertheless, there is power in achieving a certain critical mass and even the oldest of institutions cannot remain completely rigid in the face of stresses and strains brought on by changes in their makeup. Or at least I want to believe that because I am ready to hear about something that will be more like an action-packed show about women getting things done than a soap about greedy old men with too much power. Let’s turn this soap off please.

Best,

Karmela

* Soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter physics that deals with physical systems that can be easily deformed through mechanical stress of altered by thermal effects. These are systems that exemplify the kind of physics that happens at room temperature, as opposed to the ultra-low temperatures of hard condensed matter, and include liquids, polymers, granular materials, colloids and a variety of materials common in biology. Studies of soft matter physics typically do not involve quantum effects, due to high temperatures the systems are found at, and they center on mesoscopic physics rather than small structures such as atoms.

** For those of us in the West, an even more unsettling comparison emerges as we can clamor about the amount of drama being unreal and unreasonable without ever having to confront it – it is our privilege to pretend that none of the commotion touches us in real life, just like shocking soap developments do not affect the real lives of their viewers.

***

ABOUT THIS WEEK

LEARNING: The theme of this past week for me has been returning to a regular research routine after a couple of weeks of working on my advisor’s theater production in addition to my projects. To that end, I returned to spending time with quasicrystal literature and trying to map out some plausible next steps in our own studies of these structures with a collaborator that might soon disappear due to family obligations. Our research group has historically not been overly successful at observing deadlines so pushing this project forward before it becomes strictly my responsibility ranks high on my to-do list. We produced some potentially promising ways to visualize the wavefunctions of our quasicrystal system, and possibly even stumbled upon a hint of deterministic chaos, but there is still a long way to go in terms of pen-and-paper work that I am always trying to further my expertise in.

Additionally, since winter has seen a few of my other collaborations produce rather polished paper manuscripts, I am back in the business of dealing with referee reports and journal submissions. Being at the end of my fourth year in graduate school, it is really important for me to maintain a reasonable publication schedule as I am, hopefully, nearing the end of this stage of my scientific training. Consequently, the mild annoyance of endless cover letters and overly polite clarification is probably here to stay but probably also quite worth it.

On the teaching front, even though the physics/art theater production is over, the accompanying course is still in full swing. Through some next-level instructor magic, my advisor has been able to turn the final for this course into an hour-long performance included in the program of a local arts festival, so the adventurous spirit of the class will definitely continue throughout the next few weeks. Luckily, the students have been great about painting, creating music, building installations and everything else they set out to do at the beginning of the semester, so I am hoping for another art/physics success.

Finally, for my teaching class I have by now developed a graphic syllabus, re-designed a full ten-page syllabus, wrote a number of practice questions and outlined a lesson plan, so I am starting to believe that this experience may actually prove useful to me in the future. Learning about the way others learn and how to facilitate learning is in itself rather interesting and I regret not having more of a chance to think about it with teachers within my field. It is also frustrating to be presumably learning about best teaching practices from teachers that clearly do not follow them but I think I am more and more willing to ignore that and simply try to sponge-in any little bit of insight instead. Hopefully I will eventually get around writing a more coherent reflection on how teachers learn to teach, but for now scrambling to formulate short questions concerning readings every week will have to do.

LISTENING: This episode of Hidden Brain gives a pretty good overview of perception problems that women run into when they take on leadership positions. On a similarly academic-adjacent reporting note, this episode of Freakonomics discusses what can go wrong even for women that have broken through the ‘glass ceiling’. I am not always terribly partial to Freakonomics, but this was an interesting episode and definitely added another wrinkle into this narrative that I very much care about. Since this letter also touches upon political reporting, instead of urging you to listen to On the Media or one of the politics podcasts I alluded to above, it seems equally worthwhile to try and think about the reporters themselves. I am a big fan of the Longform podcast, where writers and reporters talk about their stories and writing processes, and these two episodes featuring Maggie Haberman and Zoe Chace, respectively, provide some great insight into what it is like to report on politics and what it is like to report on politics right now. Chace’s recent This American Life feature on Jeff Flake and the inner workings of the Senate is also quite good.

On the music side of things, I wanted to advocate for either this Forn album or this gone-mad-at-sea themed playlist I have been putting together but then got very uncharacteristically side-tracked by listening to Kendrick Lamar. Given that my exposure to rap and hip hop mostly boils down to one ex-boyfriend that liked Biggie Smalls and Rick Ross and three tracks by a Croatian band I like, maybe it is not surprising that Lamar’s work was something of a novelty to me. I know I am way behind on the hype but both albums I have been listening to have been really quite something. To Pimp a Butterfly is at times catchy and at times poignant and definitely has a political edge that makes the whole thing really compelling. good kid, m.a.a.d city (which took me a while to get through as I am apparently more sensitive to occasional crude language than I thought) comes off more as a stream-of-consciousness short story than what I imagined a contemporary rap record would be like. Both records made me sort of sad and concerned so Lamar must be onto something.

WATCHING/READING/SEEING: The weekend before last I attended the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for the sixth year in a row which made for a really great Saturday (and a convenient excuse to pick up a few books I have been meaning to catch up on). One of my coworkers was nice enough to undertake this day-trip with me and we saw a few panels about writing for comics and writing horror, roamed around the convention floor and fawned over all the amazing cosplay, then ended the day with veggie kabobs in Chicago’s Greek neighborhood. I am really glad I could find time in my schedule to spend a whole day like that.

EATING: I made a few pretty enjoyable meals last week like a mushroom lentil stew or red beans and rice with okra, but the enchiladas I am sharing below were really the highlight. I am not sure when exactly the last time I had enchiladas was but I found myself inexplicably daydreaming about them and then, soon thereafter, less inexplicably eating them most days of the week. The sauce recipe is from this Full of Plants bowl recipe which I can also vouch for being very good (the tofu marinade is another component I re-use constantly) and the rest was mostly improvised. They are full of protein, super tasty, fairly filling and kept well in my fridge for almost a full week.

You will need:

For the filling:
One block of extra firm tofu (15 ounces), drained and pressed between paper towels for 20 minutes or so
1 cup cooked black beans, drained and rinsed if from a can
1/2 of a yellow onion, finely diced
1 clove garlic, minced
3 chiles in adobo, chopped, and extra adobo sauce from the can
1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt (or more, to taste)

For the sauce:
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 yellow onion, finely diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 and 1/2 cup tomato sauce
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast (optional but recommended)
1/2 teaspoon salt

For assembly:
7-8 whole wheat tortillas

For serving (optional):
Avocado, romaine lettuce, fresh limes, cashew cream (sour cream or cheese if not vegan), chopped cilantro

1. Make the sauce: heat the oil in a saucepan and add the onion. Sauté until it is soft and golden brown, about 5 minutes, then add the garlic and sauté for another 5 minutes. Lower the heat slightly and stir the mixture as burnt garlic will make the sauce bitter. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix well and simmer for 7-10 minutes. Transfer to a blender and blend for a smoother consistency if you wish.

2. Make the filling: heat the oil in a large pan, then add the onion and sauté until golden brown then add the garlic and crumble the tofu straight into the pan with your hands. Add beans and keep sautéing for 5-7 minutes, until the tofu is golden and slightly charred in places. Mix in the chipotle chiles, the adobo sauce and the spices and cook for another 5 minutes.

3. Assemble and bake: Preheat the oven to 350F. Spread about a third of the sauce at the bottom of a casserole dish. Fill each tortilla with the filling and then roll them as tightly as possible (if they are stiff briefly warm them up in the oven or the microwave) and layer over the sauce, seam side down. Once you run out of tortillas, top the assembly with the rest of the sauce and bake for 20-25 minutes or until the mixture is darkened and bubbly.

4. Serve over a bed of chopped romaine, topped with cashew cream, chopped cilantro and a squeeze of lime juice, with a side of avocado slices